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Light Iron's Lily Pad and Outpost (pictured) are used on shows such as Criminal Minds and Justified. season of Terra Nova, the current season of Hawaii Five-O and ABC's The River. The modular Mobilabs is always customized for each show, and The River has unique cam- era requirements. "They want a documentary-style feel captured from many prosumer cam- eras, including Canon Vixias, Sony EX3s and GoPros operated by cast members," says Greg Ciaccio, VP of location-based services for Deluxe Entertainment Television. "A lot of these cameras have no timecode, but Mobilabs doesn't need it: We can create timecode as part of the new master file." The highest-quality camera used on the show is Arri Alexa; it's deployed for many VFX plates, he notes. "But we see more footage from the EX3s, Vixias and GoPros — all of the POV footage is from prosumer cameras." The River requires automatic transcoding of all incoming material, regardless of codec, to Avid DNxHD 175x and matching DNxHD 36, "so anything done in the offline will translate perfectly to the online," he reports. "Everything is tracked in our database for a 1:1 relation- ship between offline and online files." On the back end of Mobilabs is a transcoding engine that's set once to the requirements of the show so it can automatically transcode in the background all of the necessary deliver- ables: In the case of The River, they consist of DNxHD 36 for editorial, DNxHD 175x for online, plus DVD and H.264 files for ABC's Mediafly desktop dailies for ABC network execu- tives. Mobilabs is installed in the show's production offices at Diamond Head Studios in Hawaii. FilmLight's Baselight, which is also part of the system for The River, is used for primary color Jeroen Hendricks was camera data supervisor for Prometheus 3D. He says he is an extension of the DP and a crossover to editorial. Turn page 50 for more details. grading along with a 50-inch Panasonic plasma monitor. "We have a data transfer person plus a colorist and assistant," says Ciaccio. "The DP and other creatives really like the immediacy of having the material right there. They can come in and direct color, and VFX can look at images and output files for their needs." Encore's VFX supervisor Stephan Fleet oversees some 100 effects per episode from the invisible to the supernatural. Mobilabs not only offers more creative opportunities on set, it's also a "huge time saver," according to Ciaccio. "The DNx36 main file is sent back to LA for editorial via a 100MB line that can transmit it quicker than realtime. The PA copies the DNx36 to a drive that's kept here and burns a DVD from the DVD iso. It's all ready the next morning." For data manage- ment all media is backed up to spinning disks and LTO5s in the field. If The River wants to integrate new cameras into its repertoire that will be an easy fit for Mobilabs. "New cameras are being introduced every couple of months it seems," Ciaccio says. "If someone wants to shoot with an F65 or Arriraw files, we can handle it. The beauty of the system is that it's configurable. "With Mobilabs we ask clients, 'What do you need? What cameras are you shooting with? What color correction do you want to do?' Then we configure the system. It's all really up to them." FILM & TV Light Iron (www.lightiron.com) is an LA-based post house that empowers those on-set with its Lily Pad and Outpost systems. Lily Pad serves as the creative suite and initial QC pass, and Outpost receives the content, creative choices and related metadata afterward for pro- cessing and triplication. Lily Pad and Outpost are expected to be used on nearly 100 projects www.postmagazine.com Post • April 2012 27